When I was a little kid, I used to read comics about superheroes, Flash, Aquaman, Beast Boy, you know the drill. I don’t even know why it fascinated me so much. I suppose it was probably the usual, standing up against the injustices of the world, going on a journey, leaving your comfort zone, growing as a person.. oh I admit it, maybe it wasn’t that deep. Maybe it was just reading about a normal person I could identify with and then watch them turn into a powerful, cool hero, who gets all the girls.
I suppose how deep the reasons truly were doesn’t matter now, but as I was mindlessly scrolling through Tumblr, while pretending to work, I stumbled upon something that piqued my interest.
It was a sponsored post, a cheaply done nightmare even a hobby graphic designer would cringe about. Still, it piqued my interest with its bright pink lettering. “Get your dream superpower today!”, it said, giving a link and a typical “click here!”
Basically it looked like a standard example of spam, like something that might be used on a lecture about Internet safety. Still I was itching to click the link. In all fairness, it didn’t even look like a REAL attempt at scamming me, badly done as it was. The background looked like it was screenshotted straight from Google images and the fonts were badly mismatched. Seeing as this was Tumblr, and with the new blaze sponsoring posts didn’t cost all that much anymore, I wondered if it was simply a joke I was missing out on.
That would make sense, a rickroll maybe. Seeing as I was bored to tears, I decided to click the link. So what if I ended up catching a virus, this was my bosses computer and I was pretty sure the bustard was gonna fire me soon anyway, so why not. My finger hovered over the mouse for a split second, before I clicked the link. What can I say, I never had especially good impulse control. The link led me to a website which looked just as badly done, if not even worse. Off purple text, on a bright acid green background, burning my poor eyes.
“Which superpower do you want?” At this point I was pretty sure that I had stumbled across some middle schooler’s first programming project, and even if graphic design definitely wasn’t their passion, (or alternately if it was, their programming dreams were doomed) I still decided to play along.
I mean if they had gone through all the trouble of having their awfully done project sponsored they must be proud of it, so I thought the least I could do was give their website some interaction. I clicked the screen, wondering if they had even managed to program a textbox, but indeed! As I clicked, a small window popped up. I thought about the question for a moment. Which superpower did I want? Super strength? No, that’s a boring answer. Everyone would want that. Flight was even worse. Then I suddenly had an idea.
I always thought that being able to walk through walls would be pretty cool. Just walking through closed doors like a ghost, no one being able to keep you locked in – or out! Not a boring and cliché answer either. But theoretically, what would be the limit of such an ability? Would I be stopped if there was a shelf after a wall, not being able to pass through non-wall? So I typed in a more general “I’d like to be able to phase through things, lol” and pressed enter. Absolutely nothing happened.
Sort of disappointed, but not having expected anything else, I closed the tab and went back to pretending to work.
If only that had been all.
But it hadn’t, because as I was scrolling on my phone in bed late at night, it fell into my face. Not all that unusual, I know. The thing was, I hadn’t let go of it. It had just slipped through my fingers in the most literal sense of the words. Right through my hand, through my wrist, as if neither of them were there at all.
Shrugging the pain off, I stared at my fingers in shock, which looked completely normal. As I reached for my phone again, nothing happened. It just stayed in my hand, like it was supposed to, considering physics and all that. Maybe my eyes had played a trick on me?
Sighing, I put my phone away, having decided that it was probably time to sleep if I started to see things that weren’t real. But although I had quickly disregarded my experience as a hallucination of my sleep deprived brain, I found myself fantasizing about heroic deeds and superhero suit designs until I drifted off to sleep. The next day at work, a miracle happened. I was actually able to be productive and get some work done! It felt like the exciting new daydream I had lost myself in the evening before. Carried me through the day effortlessly. I didn’t truly believe it of course, not really. But it was wonderful to imagine that the clickbait had been real magic, that I was… worthy somehow. That I had gotten a superpower because I was destined for greater things than this mundane life. Meaningless to say, I wasn’t completely there mentally, but the monotonous tasks went all the better, if I could let my thoughts roam freely, to imagined adventures, epic fights.
Lost in thoughts as I was, I didn’t notice immediately as my fingers took longer to press down the keys on my keyboard. What was happening only succeeded in ripping me out of my heroic reveries, as I began physically feeling the impact of the computer keys on my knuckles. Looking down, I saw that I was INDEED pressing the keys with my knuckles, as the rest of my fingers disappeared straight into the keyboard. Now, as you might imagine, I had mixed feelings about this. The first one was screaming and sending the keyboard crashing to the floor in absolute panic. The second reaction was staring at my fingers in horror, deciding that it was all a hallucination and screaming again as I went to pick up the keyboard and finding my fingers cleanly slipping through it.
Then, I sat there for a few minutes, stunned to silence. This trance was only broken as my boss came waltzing in, demanding to know why I thought it necessary to throw around his “highly modern” technical equipment. I stammered something about “spiders”, hiding my hands, and he begrudgingly left, muttering something about “women and their irrational fears”. Misogynistic guys always were easy to wrap around the finger. Tell them an excuse that feeds into their stereotypes and they’ll eat it right up. After this rude little intervention, I was left alone to continue my emotional rollercoaster in relative peace.
After short consideration, I just took my stuff (not an easy job) and left. I asked my coworker to cover for me if my absence should be noticed, and, seeing the state of disarray I was in, she immediately promised.
So I took the subway home, anxiously keeping my hands in my pockets and faced inward, so they wouldn’t phase through and alert people.
The initial shock was already beginning to die down, and despite being very afraid, I was happy. I really thought I could be some sort of hero, or a very good stage magician at least.
When I think back to that moment now, I realize how silly and childish it was. Even if things had worked out like I thought they would, I would have far easier ended up in area fifty one than a hero to the people.
As I got home, I was vibrating with excitement. I just couldn’t wait to test these new powers I was apparently developing. I didn’t care all that much about the add at that time, thinking that research about the power’s origin could wait till later.
In hindsight I doubt I would have found anything anyway. There’s a lot of stories like that on here, clicked a link I shouldn’t have clicked, visited a website I should’ve stayed away from. And it’s always the same, if you come back for the link or side it’s just vanished into thin air, leaving you without proof.
To be clear, I didn’t check at the time, and I don’t really have the opportunity to do that now. I’m just trying to get my story out there before time runs out.
Right, yes, back to the story. Sorry that I keep getting distracted.
Anyway, as I got home, I dropped my bags to the ground, kicked the door shut and sat down on the floor cross-legged. I closed my eyes, and concentrated on my fingers, on my hands. I felt absolutely nothing unusual. I kept on concentrating for a while, until I got bored and decided to do something else, as this clearly wasn’t working.
I tried to get up, and only then did it hit me: I couldn’t use my hands to get up. And if I didn’t manage to control this phenomenon, I couldn’t use my hands for anything else either.
Mostly annoyed, I painstakingly got up without my hands, to try and throw together some food. Maybe not being distracted by hunger would help me.
Now, I won’t be specific about all the ways I tried to gain control over what was happening to me, simply because it doesn’t matter. It was all useless, no amount of brainpower, concentration or specific movement did anything at all. By then, my arms passed through objects too, my hoodie sleeves hanging off my elbows, exposing my upper arms to the cold.
The anxiety kept intensifying, and I kept frantically trying anything, everything to elicit a response, until I finally fell into a fitful sleep right there on the floor.
I woke up because my head and neck hurt. The first thing I saw as I opened my eyes, was my downstairs neighbors ugly dog. Hah, isn’t that funny? I can finally admit how ugly the thing is now, because I doubt the shitstorm is going to reach me in time.
Anyways, I was staring directly into its bulging, veiny dog eyes, I could just barely suppress a scream. Maybe it was the sleepiness or, maybe it was that there was definitely too much blood in the upper half of my body, as I could hear it roaring in my ears, but it took me a few seconds to register what was going on. Until I registered the fact that I seemed to be floating roughly eight feet over my down stairs neighbors scratched up hardwood floor.
No, I realized, I wasn’t floating, I could feel my own hardwood floor on my hips and legs, aching from all the pressure that was being put on them. Then I remembered what had happened the day before.
“Well, shit.” Was all I could muster.
A bad idea really, not just completely and utterly useless, but also the last straw for the angry little devil to start barking like crazy, jumping wildly up to try bury his teeth in one of my arms, which just as limply through the ceiling as the rest of me.
Immediately, I pulled my arm up and out of reach, but I knew in a few seconds Mister Monroe would come check on his “precious little darling”, as he called the revolting thing. And if he saw me dangling through his ceiling he would either call the cops or have a heart attack right then and there.
So I strained to get up through the floor, but it felt borderline impossible without the use of arms. Finally I managed to roll half over, and with a lot of luck and possibly permanent strain to my basically nonexistent abs, my head disappeared back up through the ceiling just before being spotted.
I sat there for a few seconds, still trying to make sense what had just happened. My neck hurt, and I could already feel a terrible migraine forming for sleeping with my head just hanging down.
Still, I barely registered any of it. Whatever was happening was slowly but surely spreading across my body, and there was nothing I could do about it.
Then I had a terrible idea. “I’d like to be able to phase through things”, that’s what I had asked for. But what exactly was “things”?
Almost like a sleepwalker, I finally managed to get up, pushing the door open with a knee. Thank god I’d been too distracted to lock it the night before. The bag I had dropped was still sitting there, so I pushed it between door and frame to keep it open until I returned.
Then I went downstairs, and outside. The little garden of my department complex is pretty this time of the year, but I didn’t even notice. I just knelt down, face no doubt white as a sheet, and feeling nauseous, and lowered my arm lower, lower down. I didn’t feel the tickle of grass on my skin, I didn’t feel the cold wetness of morning dew.
I didn’t fell anything but a slight change of temperature as I reached further and further down, deep into the earth, as deep as I could go without risking toppling over again.
Then I threw up, through my arm, through strands of my long hair and right onto the grass.
I’m in my apartment now. Only my legs are still “physical”, and I’m fucking terrified. If there is a way to stop this, then I don’t know it. And I’m running out of time and options. I’ve managed to get my socks off somehow, and although I was terrified to trip during that attempt, I managed to get my phone off the low couch desk and onto the floor, right side up.
And although I had to type with my feet and my phone shut me out multiple times for typing in the password wrong, I finally managed to get access and open this page. Thankfully my phone has a speech to text option, or I would have been totally fucked.
During the time it took me to tell this story, this thing that is happening has started affecting my ankles too.
I am fucking terrified. If my body can truly pass through EVERYTHING, then what will happen if the last piece of my feet stop holding me in place? Will I fall into the ground and suffocate with dark dirt all around me, no oxygen, like being buried alive only much, much worse?
Or will I somehow be able to breathe as I fall, endlessly fall through the dark and cold earth, pulled by gravity towards the center and getting faster and faster and faster, knowing that I will never have the luck to actually crash into something to stop me?
What would kill me first? The shock? The thirst? Or would I survive long enough for the growing heat to slowly cook me alive while I keep getting closer to the center?
I don’t want to know. I really, really don’t want to know. Although I really hope that it will be the first option, at least it would be over quickly.
I wish I could put a bullet in my head so I wouldn’t have to witness what will soon happen to me. But even if I had one, I couldn’t hold on to it, and the bullet would pass right through me anyway. Ironic, isn’t it? I’m invincible to guns right now, knifes too if they don’t aim at my feet.
I’m basically a superhero. And no one except the people reading this are ever going to know. I’ll just be another missing person case to them. I really need to hit “post” now, if I still want it to actually work. Gotta get my story out there I suppose, even though it cant save me.
How about some last words? Hah. I kinda want to say something poetic, but I can’t think of anything. So I suppose I’ll leave it at this: If you find this link, don’t click it! I don’t know if it was mostly bad wording on my part, or if it purposefully twists your wishes into a nightmare. But I never want to find out what it could do with yours.